Tim Watts (Gellibrand, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Indigenous leader Noel Pearson has said that you can't tell the full story of Australia without telling three stories: the story of our oldest continuous culture on earth, the story of our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders; the story of the Westminster institutions that followed, our rule of law and our democratic institutions; and the story of our multicultural migration, a migration that has built a country where half of us either are born overseas or have a parent born overseas—the most successful multicultural nation on earth.

The marches against Australia we saw on the weekend were an insult to all three of these stories that make our country great. Australians are rightly proud of the diverse country that we have built here together. We are a country that produced John Wing, a 10-year-old Chinese-Australian boy who suggested that, in the closing ceremony of the Melbourne Olympics, athletes march not as separate countries but together as friends. That is a unique, egalitarian, Australian Olympic innovation. We are a country that has produced two Fields Medal winners, Terence Tao and Akshay Venkatesh, a migrant and a child of a migrant. We are a country enriched by the diverse contributions of Australians like Sir Gustav Nossal, Harry Seidler, Harry Triguboff, Frank Lowy, Victor Chang, Gout Gout, Usman Khawaja, Sam Kerr, Jason Day, Melanie Perkins and Jack Zhang.

We're proud that the Australians who work in our hospitals, care for our elderly, help our country grow and help our parliament govern have heritages from every corner of the globe. We're proud of them because they are us—they're our family, our friends, our teammates, our work colleagues and our classmates. The tiny number of protesters on the weekend are scared of this. They want an Australia that's small and weak. They want an Australia that never grows or changes. They want an Australia that would be left behind in the modern world. They are so clearly wrong, and that's why the vast majority of Australians disagree with them. The Scanlon Foundation's Mapping social cohesionreport has consistently found that nine out of 10 Australians believe that multiculturalism has been good for our country. We should understand that, at most, the views of those protesters are one in 10 Australians.

We have a choice about how to respond to these rallies. We should choose to take the public presence of Neo-Nazis at these rallies seriously. All groups with hateful and violent ideologies need to be taken seriously by our law enforcement and security agencies. I have been increasingly concerned about the way these groups have intimidated people, including in my electorate, without law enforcement action.

We should choose to make another choice, too, and that's to not empower these protesters by believing the lies they tell about our country. We shouldn't give the tiny number of people who turned out at these protests the unjustified power of wrongly believing that their views are widely shared by other Australians. These protests were sadder than they were scary. It's understandable that a freakshow of Neo-Nazis, sovereign citizens and racists attracted significant media attention—freakshows generally do. But we shouldn't empower this fringe element by taking the lies that they tell about our country seriously.